


Directions

by sixpences



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-26
Updated: 2006-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:23:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixpences/pseuds/sixpences
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yet another journey back from the end of the world, written for <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/je_challenge/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/je_challenge/"><b>je_challenge</b></a> Challenge 5.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Directions

"The wind only blows in one direction," Jack says conversationally. He's at the wheel and she's perched on the quarterdeck stairs again, and she wonders if he means to be ridiculous. "Always forward, you see? And so does a ship." He runs a hand gently across two spokes. "She can't go backwards."

Elizabeth glances towards Will stitching sail on the hatch cover and wishes she didn't understand.

-

Why he would lie on deck in the darkness she can't fathom, but he catches her when she trips over him and pulls her down too, half laughing and half protesting at the way his hands linger, and the way the nearness of his time-scarred body makes her heart race.

"Familiar, Miss Swann?" He growls, and a fiery flicker of lantern light agrees. "But where's the rum?"

"I don't know," she says honestly, trying to remember all the reasons she should walk away.

-

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, and shivers at cold rings against the small of her back, and perhaps she means the rum or the shackles or even this, wrapped in silence against the low creaking of timber and the men only a deck below. The cabin is full of moonlight and it's baring bone again; she'd worry he was seeing too much if his eyes weren't closed against her hair, whispering.

"Liar," Jack says, and kisses her.

-

Will has eyes to see the empty hammock; he knows when she's on watch and when she's abandoned stained canvas for another harbour. On some evenings, when the Pacific sun turns the ocean into gold, she still wants to run to him and brush away tangled hair to see the laughter hidden in his face, but perhaps it's fading now. Everything is fading as the stars grow less familiar, everything except for the ridges of scars under her fingertips; they've always been too real.

-

There's the Horn to come and northward winds, a storm brewing in the Caribbean. Elizabeth watches the bowsprit draw lines over the horizon with a strange kind of longing she can't quite name.

"My father said I dreamed too much," she remarks when Jack's footsteps come up behind her.

"There's no such thing," he replies.


End file.
